I'm passionate about drawing, designing & UX. Currently I'm a Sr. Designer at AMS, the digital consultancy arm of The Atlantic. Previously, I worked at NPR in Boston as a product designer and founded Russ Gossett. Illustration + Design, where I continue to illustrate for a range of clients. I also blog when I can.

NPR Core Publisher

A flexible & powerful CMS built for public media

Core Publisher is a CMS for public radio stations. Used by almost 200 NPR member stations around the country, NPR Digital Services overhauled CP to offer greater flexibility for stations of all sizes.

As lead designer, I began by reimagining the platform at a high-level considering fluid grids and clean typography. That quickly transitioned into goal-setting, usability testing and collaborating with stations. The CP team consists of a product manager, 2 engineers, 1 front-end developer and myself. In just a few months we began rolling out the new responsive theme. However, it is more than a theme. It's improved functionality and flexibility.

Design improvements included a new way to place assets, display posts and inject underwriting content, as well as the ability to fully customize a station's masthead to fit their needs. But, perhaps the biggest challenge, because stations have different needs meant all of my designs needed to be modular in order to accommodate a variety of situations. Since flexibility was the #1 goal, each homepage component (header, navigation, content, headlines, bylines, footer, etc.) was thought of as part of a system in order to provide versatility and truly adaptive layouts. The result is greater flexibility with a ton of different layout options. For example, look at WWNO and KUOW.

We also rolled out a persistent player feature, which allows visitors to stream local radio while seamlessly browsing great local content. Check out a few stations using our beta release: Michigan Radio, WAMC and WVXU.

NPR Composer

Playlist management and scheduling web app

Composer is NPR Digital Services’ most widely used web product. It’s used by hundreds of public radio stations across the country to manage on-air playlists and program schedules.

My role included designing user flows, wireframes and HTML prototypes so that we could quickly test our assumptions and iterate. As the project continued I created style guides and pattern libraries, which led to improved designer/developer collaboration.

The redesigned and reengineered Composer launched in 2013 and stations are still providing feedback…

“Lovin’ the album art and the new search. This may solve 250% of the complaints we get around music. You’re my new personal heroes.” — Jim Hill (KUNC)


“Everyone has agreed that this is a big upgrade, especially with ease of training and use - so many, many thanks for that!” — Kyle Smith (WYEP)

Litl ABC Shore

Edu-tainment for iOS Kids

The gameplay is simple: Help Crabby the Crab dig in the sand to find letters. Every 3–5 letter word the child spells correctly unlocks a piece of a sand dollar. Collect all the pieces and unlock more challenging words.

As the UX/UI designer, my role was UX documentation, visual design (exporting assets for iOS) and character design. I worked with a team of developers and another designer/animator at Litl to create this game for preschool age children. The objective of the game was to improve word and character recognition using gestures.

We found that children responded positively to a helpful character, like Crabby, because it is similar to the way a parent or teacher encourages and informs a child of that age.

State Street

Thinking with the business user in mind

At State Street, I worked on their in-house marketing team designing and developing microsites that were released alongside thought leadership and financial white papers. I also worked with partners overseas on their CMS and corporate intranet redesign. The goal: Create simple and intuitive interfaces for business users that were on-brand and on-time. Sketching and defining user flows became an important task for every project.

RGID

Illustrations and Infographics

I keep my pencil in everything I do, whether it's a logotype for a corporation or a fully-rendered editorial spot for your local public radio station.

The featured illustrations are two different series commissioned by Aeroflot Premium. The in-flight magazine commissioned me to illustrate 10 legendary cars and 10 exotic hotels. Check out more from this series and other illustrations at rjgoose.com.

Bubucheek Clothing

Think. Live. Rock.

Starting in 2009 as a way to see how my illustrations would look on t-shirts, I formed Bubucheek with 2 friends.

In just a few years we grew our reach to over 20,000 friends, followers and Instagramers on social media. We partnered with amazing organizations and also continued to give back to our community any way we could.

I continued to develop the visual direction for the apparel line until we closed our online store in 2015.